One third of Jewish adults in Britain said they suffered an antisemitic incident in the nine months following the October 7 attack, according to a new survey published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR).
The figure marks a sharp jump from 2022, when just 23 per cent of the community experienced racism over the entire year.
The most common form of antisemitic incident experienced during Israel’s war against Hamas was a verbal attack, followed by online abuse and then discrimination at work.
While 82 per cent of Jews felt safe in the UK in May of last year, just 46 per cent said they did in November.
By June of this year the figure had risen to 61 per cent.
Women were less likely to say they felt safe than men, and Charedim more likely to feel vulnerable than other denominations.
According to the Community Security Trust (CST), antisemitism rose by 150 per cent from 2022 to 2023.
Incidents of antisemitism reported to the CST went up from 1,662 in 2022 to 4,103 last year.
But the numbers of incidents recorded in police or community statistics constitute significant undercounts, the JPR report - based on a sample of 4,500 British Jews - claims.
Its survey, JPR said, likely captured a broader range of antisemitic harassment than the CST’s figures as it included events that people would not. “There is far more antisemitism taking place, and there are far more Jews affected, than community and/or police incident data indicate,” the report states.
“Second, while every calculation indicates that levels of antisemitism in 2023 were higher than any previous year for which data exist, the extent to which an increase took place that year, and the nature of that increase, is far less clear than it needs to be if appropriate strategies are to be developed to tackle it.”
Over the past decade the proportion of Jews who believe antisemitism is a problem in Britain has significantly grown.
In 2012, just 11 per cent surveyed answered that it was a very big problem while 37 per cent said it was a fairly big problem.
By November of last year, that had risen to 54 and 33 per cent respectively.
In June of this year it had dropped slightly to 46 and 37 per cent.
According to another survey carried out - by Survation for the Jewish Leadership Council - a few weeks after the October 7 attacks in Israel and in the midst of a spike in antisemitic incidents - 87 per cent of British Jews perceived antisemitism to be a problem in the UK, “the highest proportion ever recorded,” JPR stated.
Comparison with data from 2018 during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party “indicates that twice as many British Jews defined antisemitism as a ‘very big’ problem in the UK in November 2023 as did just five years earlier,” JPR said.
Dr Jonathan Boyd, JPR’s executive director, said: “As much as the October 7 attacks on Israel unleashed a war in Gaza, they also unleashed a wave of antisemitism in the UK and across Europe the like of which most Jews today have never experienced before.
"Antisemitism is far more pervasive today than the incident data show, and a broader culture is emerging in many countries where Jews live that, whether strictly antisemitic or not, feels alienating, threatening and hostile. This is completely unacceptable.”
He added, “At a time of such abnormally high levels of concern among Jews, it has become essential to invest in high quality, professionally conducted independent research, as part of a serious government-level strategy to tackle antisemitism today.”
Since Brexit, the UK was no longer part of an extensive research programme into antisemitism being undertaken across the European Union, he pointed out.’We call on the UK Government and philanthropic community to plug this critical gap as a matter of urgency.”
The report introduced the notion of “ambient antisemitism” where a Jewish person may not experience an incident directly but feel a sense of alienation and concern through acts such as the tearing down of hostage posters.
